Hey,
your name sounds very familiar to me. Did we communicate in the past regarding something?

Thanks for your opinion about ReactOS as an OS. It's indeed come a long way, however there are still many things requiring attention.

As for your experiment. It's quite simple to do. You can build your own version of ReactOS from trunk (or just download the prebuilt .iso from our website - the trunk build, not the last release), install it and then try to "strip" it down as much as you want.
Explorer.exe is specified as a shell in a special registry key, I could look up the path if you like. Hackish way would be to delete explorer.exe and rename notepad.exe to explorer.exe. Or, better, use cmd.exe as a shell, it allows to actually do something with the OS instead of just typing text in the editor.

After that, it would be needed to look at dependencies and actually delete all DLLs which are not necessary.
This way you get a really lean ReactOS install.

Best regards,
Aleksey Bragin.

On 19.06.2012 19:06, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:

Greetings All,

I am new to ReactOS but have much experience with with Windows, Linux, etc... as well as programming mainly in C/C++.

Recently, I have decided to looking into ReactOS from a learning perspective after which, once the learning curve has been completed, I may try to get involved with some of the development efforts as well as work on some additional projects.

From what I have seen, ReactOS has come a very long ways in its development and is really turning into a special OS to be recognized.

I would like to review some of the documentation on the Wiki but had a question regarding an experiment that I wanted to investigate with ReactOS.

The question that I wanted to answer is this.

What is the absolute minimum size, as relates to booting and OS files that are needed by ReactOS to run, for example, the notepad.exe program?

To caveat this, it would include leaving out all of the OS tools, Explorer, Desktop, and absolutely everything that is not clearly needed to run the notepad.exe application.

Basically, I would like ReactOS to boot and go directly into the notepad application. The real point here is to investigate what "absolute" minimum files are needed to run a simple application.

Sounds a bit crazy, but that is the question that I would like to answer.

Any ideas or information related to this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and have a great day,

Lonnie